Posts from the “Manhattan” Category

Godlis: History is Made at Night

Posted on September 14, 2016

Photo: The Ramones, CBBG, 1977. ©Godlis, courtesy of agnès b. galerie, New York.

“There are no secrets that time does not reveal,” Jean Racine wrote. With the benefit of hindsight, it has become evident that punks are true embodiment of the counterculture movement. They never sold out and they never said die. They just keep on keeping on, D.I.Y.

Photographer David Godlis arrived on the New York scene in 1976, camera in hand, carrying as much film as he could reasonably hold in the pockets of his black jeans without looking indiscreet. He usually shot without a flash, using the techniques of masters like Brassai, who had famously photographed Paris at night forty years prior and inspired Godlis’s masterful eye.

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Photo: Richard Hell, Bowery, 1977. ©Godlis, courtesy of agnès b. galerie, New York.

Categories: 1970s, Art, Books, Crave, Manhattan, Music, Photography

Rashid Johnson: Fly Away

Posted on September 12, 2016

Artwork: Rashid Johnson, Untitled Escape Collage (2016). © The artist. All images © The artist. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth.

The sounds of a piano drift eloquently through the room, enveloping you in a soaring, intense crescendo of freedom hard won, the freedom to pursue not happiness, but joy. To African American artist Rashid Johnson, the distinction is necessary. “Joy is something so many of us understand. It is John Coltrane’s ‘Love Supreme,’” Johnson observes before adding with casual insouciance, “The steaks at the strip house are really good.”

Johnson is leading a tour through Fly Away, a new exhibition of his work at Hauser & Wirth, New York, currently on view through October 22, 2016. Five years in the making, the monumental exhibition fills four rooms, each evoking its own breathtaking way of relating to our world.

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nstallation view of “Rashid Johnson: Fly Away” at Hauser & Wirth, 2016. © Rashid Johnson. Photo by Martin Parsekain, courtesy of Hauser & Wirth.

Categories: Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Manhattan

In Any Other Way

Posted on September 11, 2016

Downtown Manhattan with World Trade Center towers, seen from “lover’s lane” in New Jersey, 1983 by Thomas Hoepker.

And I sometimes forget that not everyone heard the sound of engines rumbling low to the ground and then the sound of police sirens and fire engines racing down the street. Emergency, except this is New York, and it always is. And I sometimes forget that I didn’t hear it once, I heard it twice, those engines rumbling low over my head. And then the sound, an impact I had never heard until I heard it again, but I am inside and I am at my desk and I am answering emails and no one is in the office yet.

And I sometimes forget that not everyone was there when it happened. That they didn’t smell it for months coming out of the ground, throughout September and October wondering if it will ever stop because it feels like it is in your hair and in your skin and its not like anything you can describe because it doesn’t smell like anything you want to relive. And the smell lingers outside the house and outside the office and it’s much too close but it’s far away enough that I don’t have to breathe it in except when I can see those clouds that come out of the manholes. And then I hold my breath like a little kid sitting in a car that is driving by the cemetery. It is a long minute.

And though it has been eleven years I cannot go because it’s just too strange to act like it’s business as usual because there are some things that I don’t want to remember and I don’t want to forget. We did a book right after and raised money because it was the only thing we knew how to do and that felt like something, because you wanted to contribute. But I had to release myself so I gave away the book because I will not look at violence like it is art.

Only now it is odd. Because I peruse blogs for photos and I find these images of planes upon impact and buildings ablaze and people jumping and it has become an aesthetic to be consumed. It is but a photograph littered in between hundreds and thousands of photographs of teen angst and lust and drama and dreams.

And so it has become a photograph. And this makes me think. About what it is when reality becomes but a memory, a memento, a token of life lived compressed into two-dimensions. An image. A decorative thing. I wonder what happens when something is both sacred and profane, and its meaning changes as it intersects with those who will never know it in any other way.

Brooklyn, 2012

Categories: Manhattan, Photography

Martha Cooper & Henry Chalfant: Subway Art

Posted on August 29, 2016

Photo: “Midg” with yellow school bus, 1982. © Martha Cooper

During the early 1970s, graffiti made it way to the trains of New York, spreading across the city like a virus and capturing the imagination of a new generation of artists in every borough. Sneaking into the yards and walking through the tunnels in the dead of night, graffiti writers were on a mission like no one had seen before—or has seen since. Fame. Recognition. Renown. In the city that never sleeps, Kings were crowned.

But as quick as it came, it disappeared. Were it not for the photographs, there would be nothing left. Fortunately writers and artists share that same compulsion to document and to collect. As fate would have it, Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant had both been documenting the same scene at the same time from distinctive vantage points.

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Photo: Blade, 1980. © Henry Chalfant

Categories: 1970s, 1980s, Art, Books, Bronx, Brooklyn, Crave, Graffiti, Manhattan, Painting, Photography

Into the Groove: The Jazz Portraits of Herman Leonard

Posted on August 5, 2016

Photo: Duke Ellington by Herman Leonard. Gelatin silver print, 1958. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution © Herman Leonard Photography, LLC.

In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit and laid to waste so many lives in the city of New Orleans. The home and studio of photographer Herman Leonard (1923–2010) was destroyed when the 17th Canal Levee broke near his home. The storm claimed 8,000 silver gelatin prints Leonard had made; fortunately, Herman’s crew had gathered the negatives and placed them in the care of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. But Leonard’s time in New Orleans had come to a close after nearly a quarter of a century on the local jazz and blues scene. Leonard relocated to Studio City, California, where he spent his final years re-establishing his business.

And what a business it was. Leonard recounted his early years in an interview with JazzWax, recalling, “I opened my first studio on Sullivan Street in New York’s Greenwich Village in 1948. I worked free-lance for magazines and spent my spare time at places like the Royal Roost and Birdland. I did this because I loved the music. I couldn’t wait to be with Lester Young at a club and hear him and photograph him playing his music. I hoped that on film I could preserve what I heard. It didn’t hurt that I got into the clubs for free. My photographs helped publicize the clubs, so owners let me in.”

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Photo: Billie Holiday by Herman Leonard. Gelatin silver print, 1949. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution © Herman Leonard Photography, LLC.
Read more at http://www.craveonline.com/art/1017217-jazz-king-photographs-herman-leonard-national-portrait-gallery#tz6wkDjUMWC5zHPO.99

Categories: 1960s, Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Music, Photography

Weegee’s Bowery

Posted on July 17, 2016

Photo: Weegee, [Shop window of tattoo parlor, New York], ca. 1943.

“Sure. I’d like to live regular. Go home to a good looking wife, a hot dinner, and a husky kid. But I guess I got film in my blood. I love this racket. It’s exciting. It’s dangerous. It’s funny. It’s tough. It’s heartbreaking,” the great photographer Weegee said. Born Usher Fellig in 1899, what is now the Ukraine, he was renamed Arthuer when the family immigrated to New York in 1909. He first took up photography at age 14. By 1935, he quit his day job—and how blessed we are for it.

As Weegee told Bomb Magazine in 1987, “In my particular case I didn’t wait ’til somebody gave me a job or something, I went and created a job for myself—freelance photographer. And what I did, anybody else can do. What I did simply was this: I went down to Manhattan Police Headquarters and for two years I worked without a police card or any kind of credentials. When a story came over a police teletype, I would go to it. The idea was I sold the pictures to the newspapers. And naturally, I picked a story that meant something.”

Weegee was the best kind of journalist: he was a man of the people, for the people, and he did it right. He understood the gritty glamour of his milieu and the power of the photograph to tell the story instantaneously. He bore witness with the eye of an artist and the speed of a professional, always he first on the scene. “News photography teaches you to think fast,” Weegee observed, and at a time when newsprint was the main mode of visual communication, he dominated.

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Categories: Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Poetry

Bruce Davidson: Magnum Legacy

Posted on June 20, 2016

Photo: Bruce Davidson USA. New York City. 1980. Subway. ©Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos, courtesy of Prestel.

“When I was a kid, I played baseball and you heard the sound the bat made when it really connected with the ball; you knew you had a great hit. It’s the same with photography: sometimes you hear that click of the shutter and you know you’ve caught something really special,” observes American photographer Bruce Davidson (b. 1933).

Davidson, a member of Magnum Photos since 1958, authored some of the most seminal monographs of the twentieth century including Brooklyn Gang, East 100 Street, and Subway. He is now the subject of a new book, Bruce Davidson: Magnum Legacy by Vicki Goldberg (Prestel), which explores the photographer’s life work in photography. Davidson speaks with Crave about his work and about the magic of photography that kept him hooked in a career that spans six decades.

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Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, Art, Books, Brooklyn, Crave, Manhattan, Photography

Antonio López: Future Funk Fashion

Posted on June 17, 2016

Artwork: Antonio Lopez, Carol Labrie, NYC, 1969, Marker and color overlay, 18” x 24”, Courtesy of the Estate of Antonio Lopez & Juan Ramos.

Antonio López is a Nuyorican legend. Born in Utado, Puerto Rico in 1943, he was just two years old when he began to sketch dresses from fabric his mother had given him. At the age of seven, his family moved to New York City, Spanish Harlem to be exact. Back in the days, the neighborhood was riddled with gangs as brilliantly depicted in Piri Thomas’s memoir, Down These Mean Streets. To keep her son off the streets, López’s mother, a seamstress, asked him to draw flowers for her embroideries. He also helped his father, a mannequin maker, to apply make-up an stitch wigs on to figures.

Such home training portended beautifully, as López earned a scholarship to the prestigious Traphagen School of Fashion, which provided Saturday programming for children. From there he went on to attend the High School of Art and Design and the Fashion Institute of Technology. While at F.IT., he began an internship at Women’s Wear Daily, which lead to a position on staff. He left school, and that’s when everything began.

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Antonio Lopez, Dream Girls, American Vogue, 1977, Pencil & watercolor, 18” x 24”, Courtesy Estate of Antonio Lopez & Juan Ramos.

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Latin America, Manhattan

Attitude: Portraits by Mary Ellen Mark, 1964–2015

Posted on May 31, 2016

Photo: Gloria and Raja, Great Gemini Circus, Perintalmanna, India, 1989. ©May Ellen Mark, courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery.

“I’m most interested in finding the strangeness and irony in reality. That’s my forte,” American photographer Mary Ellen Mark (1940–2015) observed, very much aware of the gift she brought to the world. Her passion for the camera and the way in which it captured the curious sides of life can be seen in her life’s work. For five decades, Mark was a singular figure in the medium, producing a series of work that speaks to her love for humanity in its infinite forms.

Attitude: Portraits by Mary Ellen Mark, 1964–2015, now on view at Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York, through June 18, 2016, presents nearly 40 works from the artist’s singular archive. Melissa Harris, editor-at-large at Aperture Foundation, curated the show, selection works from Mark’s famous series, each of them sparkling with life and revealing an intense curiosity about the nature of our days and nights.

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Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Photography

Invisible Man: Gordon Parks and Ralph Ellison in Harlem

Posted on May 24, 2016

Photo: Gordon Parks. Untitled (Harlem, New York), 1952. Anonymous gift. © The Gordon Parks Foundation.

“I am an invisible man.  No I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe:  Nor am I one of your Hollywood movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids - and I might even be said to possess a mind.  I am invisible, simply because people refuse to see me,” Ralph Ellison wrote in his 1952 novel, Invisible Man. A classic of twentieth century American literature, Ellison explores the complexity of being a black man living under Jim Crow laws in the United States.

At the same time, one man was making visible previously unpublicized worlds, the world of African American experience. That man was photographer Gordon Parks, and the medium to reach the masses was LIFE magazine. Parks and Ellison were friends as well as comrades in the struggle, using art as a means to raise consciousness.

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Categories: Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Photography

Donna Ferrato: Tribeca 10013

Posted on May 23, 2016

Southern skyline of Tribeca, Tower 1, 2015.

Sometimes, the light is right and the Manhattan grid finds itself aligned with the rays of the sun as they shine down from the sky above on one tower standing alone. This is New York. Record scratch. Say what? It’s uncanny how absence becomes the presence of the erased. Once there was two. Then there was none. Now there’s one. It’s hard to know what to make of it.

New York is a city that proves the only constant is change, and if you live here long enough, it becomes the height of surreal estate. Take the neighborhood of Tribeca, the triangle below Canal Street. By the mid-nineteenth century, it was a bustling commercial center for industrial business. But the 1960s, most businesses had left, and Tribeca emptied out into a gorgeous ghost town. Attracted to light and space, artists soon found themselves with incredible lofts for living and working. As with the path of gentrification, soon thereafter the wealthy capitalized on the developments made, turning Tribeca into downtown’s most exclusive zip code.

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Categories: Art, Crave, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Photography